Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American author and flaneur (“a man who saunters around observing society”).

Taleb spent more than two decades as a risk trader before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability. He has completed 600,000 option trades and now specializes in the mitigation of tail risk.

Taleb has also written more than 50 scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability.

He’s currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering (quarter time position), and scientific advisor at Universa Investments.

In 2015, Taleb started Real World Risk Institute, LLC﻿ together with a few like-minded people, with the mission to revolutionize education by making it closer to the practitioner model. Real World Risk Institute grants a Mini-Certificate in Real-World Risk, about how to make decisions under uncertainty. The program is dedicated to risk professionals, analysts, professional risk takers, and generally curious people who want to understand fragility, antifragility and probability problems in an interactive environment.

Taleb refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”.